The Garden of Earthly Delights
by J.K. Edgars
Summary: During 1990s. Vicious and Spike are half brothers of different nationalities. Spike, a widower, courts his exquisite and spoiled subordinate, Faye as Vicious is preoccupied with Spike’s daughter, the quiet and neglected, fourteenyearold Julia L.
1. Prologue

**Disclaimer**: Props to my homies over at Sunrise. I honestly don't know what I have creative right to, so I'll have to say that I have none.

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_La Défense_ rises augustly and powerfully from the barren Parisian hellscape I so acrimoniously called home. Like monoliths of modern society rising from a sea of illness from the old world, it gave even me refuge from my self-imposed European prison. Perhaps this city was better (in the sense of health and culture) than the motherland... I certainly hold no more affection for Petersburg than I do Paris. But to me, at that point in my life, (for a decade I lived there) all of Paris was St. Peter and St. Paul. Whenever he came, I met him at La Défense; partly because he no longer spoke a word of French and it would be imperative that I shield him from the stuffy citizenry of the city major, partly to keep him as far away from possible from my ill-kept, cheap apartment, and a job not comparable to his own.

And I still don't understand why, when he asked me to join him in Manchester, that I hesitated for three long years. I tend to think it was jealousy- decades of bitter rivalry unspoken- but to this day I can't place it. What I _connais bien_, however, is just how excellent my decision was to leave when I did, and how things could not possibly have played out as they did had I abandoned my self-respect and immediately crawled off to England at his illustrious heels.


	2. Chapter 1 Also sprach Zarathustra

I think that sharing a mother eliminated a lot of potential animosity between my brother and me. We didn't compete for the affections of our loving matron. His father, with whom the three of us lived, never offered anything of the sort, so it's not as though there was any contest in the paternal department. My own father I saw biannually on routine and unemotional visits when he was allowed to vacation to Marseilles.

I was the product of an unhappy and experimental marriage. My mother, Cesaire Spiegel, née Clemenceau, was a very pretty russified Frenchwoman, who, in desperation of poverty, married my wealthy father (respected party bureaucrat) and in 1953 produced me- Victor Pavelovich Dzerzhinsky. My mother was somewhat of a decadent woman and could not for long tolerate the hardworking mentality of my father and of the Russian people. One simply cannot drop a woman from France _of all_ nationalities into the most industrious country of its time. When she fled with me (as an infant- I speak not a word of Russian) from Leningrad to Saarbrücken, a city comfortably near Alsace-Lorraine, she met Brandeis Spiegel and one year later, in 1955, gave birth to my brother, Ashley Zarathustra Spiegel.

Ashley, from his birth, was a charming child. His brown curls and almost garnet eyes stood out distinguishingly from a cherubic face. As he grew, he became masculine and tall, towering over the upturned eyes of an adoring plethora of young girls- his adolescence was unawkward and his young-adulthood unsullied by alcoholism, debt or disease. (However, he smoked like a chimney and was to succumb to lung cancer at age fifty-two.) His popularity garnished him with a myriad of nick-names, epitaphs and among them, athletic titles, but his closest circle (at the French-speaking catholic school we attended in Saarbrücken), of which I was so graciously a part, referred to him as "Spike."

Distinctly I remember it was in the bleak June of 1973 that he came upon me on the planar roof of our modern home. My skin has never been particularly receptive to sunlight, and from my shelter under the awning, I watched him pace the concrete in his tanned grandeur, the midday light ricocheting off his silver jewelry and Oakley sunglasses.

"Bon matin, Spike."

"Bon_jour_. Dupuis neuf heures tu restes ici. Qu'est ce que tu lis?"

"Camus. Il était populaire dans les années 1930s."

"Existentialiste merde," he sniffed, his accent heavy with German.

"Tu prefères Kant? Marx? Peut-être Kierkegaard?"

"Shut up. We speak English now."

"But, _mein Bruder_, you are terrible at English."

"But, _my brother_, I must practice. I was accepted, yes? To American University! Victor, I get into business school!"

And he graduated five years later with a BA in accounting and a minor in banking. He was immediately hired for a managerial position at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation in Ottawa, rising swiftly through the ranks until HSBC Canada could not accommodate his wisdom and success in the monetary manner he desired. So, descending from the mountain, he went on to head Deutsche Bank in New York and, _ensuite_, Manchester.


	3. Chapter 2 L'Etranger

I'm sure you've been able to figure out that Vicious is called "Victor" in this story. Just a touch more of realism. Of course, Ashley Spiegel is Spike. Faye and Julia will be coming in at least the next two chapters and Jet and Edward in future ones. Thank you for reading. This is my first fic, so I'll appreciate reviews of any kind.

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Like all European public transportation, the train from London (_comme le train de Paris et le bateau de La Manche_) to Manchester was stuffy and mildly dirty. Quitting my seat next a hysterical middle-aged woman, I greedily spent fifteen minutes in the washroom shaving and straightening my grey sportscoat and cheap polyester cravat. Remembering how I looked in then in that calcium-stained mirror (I was forty-two at the time- the year was 1995) reminds me that perhaps I should give my endearing readers a visual of their _scriptor incognito. _You must imagine me quite different from my brother in personality, but I am perhaps even more so in physical aspects. Although at six feet two, I rival him in height, you would not fathom us brothers, even only half. Long ago I went completely grey and I keep my somewhat long hair combed back upon my head in an old-fashioned manner. My skin is fair, my eyes are blue- my brother has been described before as "lanky" but I am, to exaggerate, emaciated.

I was anticipating with great excitement my Manchester debut- the reader must understand, I was not at the complete mercy of my successful sibling. At the time that he'd announced his engagement at American University, I'd been attending l'Université Sorbonne for two years studying psychology, literature, the French language, and political science among other eclectic subjects. I graduated with decent marks and eventually obtained a PhD in linguistics. In my exile in Paris, I made a paltry sum translating for a publisher that shall remain anonymous. I was to teach, upon the commencement of the school year, French at a wealthy private school that was also attended by Spike's daughter. Skirting what I think may be a national law, the school hired me without any education credentials, probably believing that the PhD and those three credit hours of psychology from my undergraduate years sufficiently made up for my lacking abilities as a teacher of teenaged children.

As the huge mechanical beast in which I was riding groaned and screeched to a halt (although it had seemed the entire journey that we were going at a maximum, ten miles per hour) only two hours late, (I have heard horror stories about American Amtrak) I made my way to the door, impolitely ignored the conductor's smile and instantly spotted my brother's hair in the crowd.

"Bienvenue!"

"Oh, cut it out."

"I see you're quite pleased to be in England. Is it the weather? Because I must say, it's always quite grey. England has no Côte d'Azur, but Ireland's quite green..."

"Actually, I am. Have you got a car or a cab? It's wonderful to see you."

He took neither of my two dusty and old suitcases, but held the back door of his black Porsche open for me as I tossed them in, causing satisfying damage to the upholstery.

"Porsche hated your people."

"Ha, Porsche's dead, now my people rule _Porsche_. Speaking of my people, you missed Julia's bat mitzvah. No, no, whatever. It was uneventful, she didn't really care."

"Ophelia wasn't Jewish, was she?"

"No, but neither was mutti. Dad was able to come. He was quite pleased, you can imagine."

My brother and I, between graduating from college and meeting each other at a Manchester train station in middle age, had been married once, respectively. Spike to a flaxen-haired Danish girl named Ophelia (Ha ha!) Andersen, I to a woman who still warms the cockles of my heart. Ophelia was an unintelligent, but mild-mannered and agreeable woman. After performing her maternal duty by giving birth to Julia Lillian (Lenore, Lee, Leigh...) Spiegel, she was consumed by one of the various feminine cancers, and was survived by her husband and, at the time of her expiration, three-year-old daughter.

What can I say about my _ancienne conjoint_ that would do her justice? Anastasia Lafayette was one of two women I ever really loved. I met her in my last year as an undergraduate at La Sorbonne. She was, using the best word I know to describe her, _mignonne_. Short and slightly chubby, she was well-endowed and energetic; always a hard drinker, she brought me out of my intellectual shell and introduced me to parties, people and indulgences. All mocha skin and soft brown eyes, her hair was a particular shade of chestnut auburn; I'll forever remember the way her small brown curls bounced back into place in spite of any disturbance. We married young, but not to stave off loneliness or poverty like my mother, but out of joy and the vibrancy of youth. However, our tastes were far too different, and over time, we began to stray from one another. Our work schedules didn't overlap as we'd like and in 1977 she'd made up her mind to go to Bangladesh or some other disenfranchised Southeastern Asian nation with the American (again) Peace Corps. We divorced without malice or revenge. I saw Annie in 1983, still using my name, fat and old, but as happy and energetic as she was twenty years ago, living in Aix-en-Provence with a common-law husband.

It was quite late that night when we arrived at my brother's upscale apartment. We dropped my bags off at my new residence (I was to stay within my means at a considerably less dear apartment on the floor below that of my brother's) and made our way up the stairs to take brandy in his parlor.


	4. Chapter 3 Helene of Madrid

"Julia! I told you not to leave the lights on."

Although his flat was constructed of drapes, carpets, carpentry and furniture of exceptional quality, it was cluttered and smelled of stale cigarette smoke. Passing piano and half empty mahogany bookcase, an expensive antique globe that still read "Rhodesia," Hoosier cabinet, television and standing mirror, we came upon the half open door of the lighted room about which Spike was scolding his daughter.

"Now, it's not as if we have complete security, despite the electronics. Now, I'm really not supposed to say, but..."

When he pushed the door of his parlor open completely, our olfactory nerves were instantly assailed by the scent of powerful and fresh tobacco smoke. Into my view came perhaps the most ravishing women I've ever in my life seen in person. She was stretched languidly on his burgundy davenport, smoking what appeared to be one of many cigarettes that night and smiling at us seductively.

"Ah, Faye," he said nonchalantly, "how did you get in?"

"Julia. I, ah... haven't interrupted, have I?"

"Oh, this is just my brother. You can help me welcome him to Manchester, you see, he's newly arrived from _Paris_. Victor Pavelovich, Ms. Faye Valentine, Ms. Valentine, my brother Victor."

She shook my hand strongly and I settled into a lounge chair, taking in and digesting the view of her cream skin and long, stockinged legs. She sported a short, black evening dress of silk with a scarf of red chiffon around her neck. Her nails and lips were ruby red and her mascara meticulously applied. I'd never known such beautiful women existed outside of Brazil.

"You're Parisian, then? You don't speak like your brother," she said accusingly through viridian eyes.

"No, no. My name is Dzerzhinsky."

"Polish?"

"Close enough."

"Russian, Faye, _Russian_. Dumb broad. Cigarette?"

"You know I don't smoke," I told him over this gorgeous Faye's loud declarations of offense. "You'll give your girl cancer, you know."

I would later learn many things about Ms. Faye Valentine, but perhaps I should start with the basics of her general circumstances. She was the daughter of two wealthy Spanish aristocrats- one a natural gas entrepreneur and the other a fashionable, half-Singaporean Madrid sex icon and minor celebrity. Her father took her to London at age three and over the duration of our acquaintance, I never heard her speak a word of her native language. After a stormy dispute with, and subsequent estrangement from, her father, she went off to Manchester to make her own way (plus supplemental allowance from Daddy Valentine, despite the parental altercation) at Deutsche Bank. The exact official title of her position, I don't recall, but I believe it went something along the lines of: "Assistant to the Vice President of Clientele Services." What exactly this distinct capacity entailed was more clear than any other title that could possibly be given to her. Deutsche Bank, Manchester's finest international clients included, but were not limited to: large private investors, (sums up to 100,000 USD or more, multiple accounts) multinational contracting firms accepting loans, World Bank delegates, celebrities or royalty seeking patronage or consultation, plus the occasional federal inspector. It was Faye's job to accompany her boss (VP, Clientele Services) on extra-contract excursions to upscale bars, private dinners, burlesque houses and, on occasion, karaoke rooms. I was assured by Spike that Ms. Faye never engaged in sexual affairs with these important clients, and I believe him. She was a woman of considerable passion, but extremely selective and private- certainly not conservative in dress, but in practice, and that should be commended. She was, however, impetuous and fitful as well as insecure and spoiled, and her faults amounted nearly to the level of her beauty.


	5. Chapter 4 That Now so Lowly Lies

**Author note**: Psychobeautyqueen- I am not at all offended by your review and indeed, I'm very thankful for your criticism- there is nothing worse than an author that refuses to improve. You weren't psycho in the least. I've started reading "Lucifer's Garden," assuming that that is the most recent fic which you are referring to, and hopefully I will learn something from that as well as from your review. In this chapter, and I address this to my readers too, I'll try to demonstrate what you've suggested. I was concerned too with the lack of dialogue in my fic and I'll try to work on that (and cut down on the French.) But I'd like to respond to your criticism on one point: your example with Faye, and I realize that this was only and example, is difficult to show considering the form of storytelling I've chosen; Vicious is narrating- he wasn't there. But once again, I will try to make a departure from long and drawn-out narrations.

On the chapter and related future: Enter Julia. Exeunt Faye. Very short. (I'm afraid that it's choppy.) Hopefully I haven't annoyed you with the Nabokovian parenthesis, (Here we go- I do not intend for this to turn into Lolita. Even if I wanted it to, I 'm probably not capable of doing so. Lolita voice, perhaps, but Bebop characters. Perhaps I should make the secondary genre parody. I promise that there won't be any long journeys in the car, but I may stick with trains. I also happen to love Edgar Alan Poe in his own right, so don't be surprised if, like Nabokov, I reference him.) but I happen to like them quite a bit. As for other characters, I do plan on working in Jet, Edward, and Shin and Lin.

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Thus I pacified Psyche and kissed her...

"I'm sorry, what?" She tore her hard green eyes away from him.

"Thus I learned quite a deal about the Belgian school of minimally-invasive cardiovascular surgery."

"How? I thought you said you were a linguist."

"I am. You just used the subjunctive."

Spike groaned and rubbed his eyes, arching his back away from his chaise lounge, jacket long off, necktie discarded.

"Don't you pay attention to anything? Tell me what you're good for, my god..." he yawned.

"I'm good for _lots_ of things," she purred, and ran her long fingers through short, pin-straight, ink-black hair.

"Yeah, go on another coke binge, why don't you?"

"In that case, I'll see you next weekend. And maybe you too, Victor. Ciao."

Spike shifted uncomfortably in his seat as I watched her stroll out the door and down the hallway.

"Ashley Brandeisyevich, where _did_ you find her?"

"In a gutter, christ. She's too vulgar for a lady, if you could even call her that."

"Any red-blooded man would call _you_ extremely lucky to have a woman of such infinite variety come to one's home on her own volition."

"You'll eventually come to understand the nature of our relationship. Besides, even if that was what I'm after, she wouldn't put out. I'd think she's a virgin."

"_Surely_ you jest," I hissed, perhaps as close to laughter I'd been the entire evening.

"You know Nisa Kenshiro? No, of course you don't. He was a client of ours about a year ago. Wealthy, handsome, tall for a Japanese... absolutely magnetic personality. Intelligent, and quite industrious, I might add- it was a high-yield partnership and satisfying while it lasted. If I were swinging for the other team... anyway, over the course of our _professional_ engagement, he became so close to Faye, and as it appeared, she to him, that he asked her to come back with him to Japan. A vacation or something like that. He tried to play it down."

"She refused, I assume."

"She's our geisha, it's true. She appears to be enamored, but when the contractual partnership terminates, so does the emotional partnership. From what I understand, she barely even answered his overture with an email."

Spike stood and stretched, then laid _himself_ down on his burgundy davenport, covering his eyes with one hand, and kicking off his polished leather shoes.

"Tell me about your mother, Mr. Speigel."

"Why can't I find another nice girl? Like Ophelia. You know, I'm due for another holiday; perhaps we could travel to Scandinavia and find ourselves some fair-haired wives? I've always liked blondes."

I responded with a meditative "hmm" and stared at the rich brown liquid in the shot glass I was holding- it surprised me that my brother, in his wealth and taste, did not own brandy goblets. I suppose that to him, alcohol was alcohol and he would drink it at every opportunity. Work had made him so. But do not get me wrong, he was certainly not an alcoholic. A blood-line of beer-drinkers spanning centuries had ingrained into his DNA a voluminous capacity to drink without getting drunk. I myself can drink vodka and rum like water.

Perhaps the only orderly room in my brother's home was the one in which we then sat. I ignored Spike, who was outlining a half-hearted retreat to northern Europe, and stared across the room at a large bookcase, made of American redwood, and the contents of its shelves. Besides a few of the classics (Gilgamesh, some Virgil, Portrait of a Lady, Fall of the Roman Empire, Two Treatises of Government, Das Kapital, et cetera.) and an impressive set of encyclopedias, the case held an assortment of objects: oriental, occidental, middle-eastern. What caught my eye, however, was a large, golden chalice placed conspicuously atop the center of the highest shelf.

"Of what origin is that bowl?"

"What?" He momentarily lifted a heavy hand from his forehead and tipped his head back on the armrest to gaze at the case.

"Greek. I should tell you about my daughter."

I had, since visiting him four years prior, an enduring recollection of young Julia sitting on a carpeted floor, crayoning neatly within the lines of a coloring book, pink stockings bunched about her knees, feral, yellow hair knotted and tousled, thrown carelessly over her shoulder.

-----

'Un vrai Da Vinci,' I said.

'Don't make fun of her. You should see her draw free-hand. It's wild- surreal.'

'In that case, a real Hieronymus Bosch.'

-----

I looked at my tired brother, hand over head, slow breath and lukewarm words.

"She's no genius, but she's fine at school. You'll like her- French is her strong subject. I've arranged it so that she's in one of your classes."

"And how old is she? Thirteen?"

"She just turned fourteen. Two months ago, in June. I bought her a cat, a Persian called Danoush."

"Did she look that up?"

"On the internet, probably. I highly doubt she knows Arabic or Urdu or whatever."

"Farsi. Urdu is Pakistan."

"Thanks, fine, whatever... Julia, it's late, go to bed."

I turned my head, the slight alcohol-induced haze clearing as I beheld Julia L. She stood, half hidden by the doorframe, one hand on the molding, looking at me with placid eyes. I stared back. Her father yawned and beckoned her into the room, never removing his hand from his forehead.

_Blessed are the sleepy. _

"Julia, come say _bonjour_ to your uncle."

She shuffled into the room, eyes to the floor, bare toes painted bubblegum pink to match her carefully-guarded fingernails. Her skin, like mine, (a genetic similarity, surely) was of an incredibly pale and sickly pallor. Long locks of wavy golden hair shimmered and spilled over her shoulders as she leaned down to give me an obligatory kiss on the cheek.

"Bonjour, Uncle Victor," she said in sing-song and dulcet voice.

"Just Victor, darling."

"Just Julia, _darling_." A short giggle played across her rather commonplace face.

"Of course. Speak to me, Julia, to the best of your ability."

"Ça fait longtemps qu'on ne s'est pas vu?"

"Yes, that's quite sufficient. I won't bother you with that again until the semester starts."

She lifted her eyes from my folded hands to my own pale visage.

"What lovely eyes you have."

_I should have hated her if she had been smiling._ But she wasn't. She didn't blush, but continued to stare at me with large, aquamarine eyes- blue as Corsican shores and Caribbean lagoons.

"Julia."

"Yeah, dad?"

"Go to bed."


	6. Chapter 5 Aimer à Loisir

"Spike, you take longer at the mirror than your daughter does."

I leaned against Spike's doorway as he applied cologne and combed his wild African mane in a very old cherry mirror that sat atop his low bureau. But Spike, perhaps a little stung by the suggestion that his manhood could be compared to that of a fourteen-year-old, sulkingly and slowly knotted his tie and arranged his cufflinks, never moving from his place in front of that mirror. I have long wondered about my brother's affinity for mirrors (or for his own image) and cannot remember a single morning at our home in Saarbrücken when he did not make us late for school. Indeed, it was he, not even his own mother, who first noticed that his eyes were asymmetrically hued. One, a rich mahogany, the other a slightly darker, coffee color.

Julia laughed, not at my outwardly failed insult, but at her own, albeit truncated, pun, "Herr Spiegel..."

"Don't even, Julia."

"Herr Spiegel..."

"Julia, you're really not very fu..."

"Herr Spiegel mag...," she repeated with more force,

"You don't even know _Deutsch._"

"...mag seinen _Spiegel._"

"Shall I throw my hat into the ring?" I'd thought up something quite clever at the time, unremembered now.

"Nigga, _please_."

"_Zhooliah_, you sound positively American."

And it was true. Her London accent, a well-harvested product of years of private schooling, was quite easy on the ears and almost completely free from harsh consonants and unpredictable vowels of Manchester, cockney, Cornish, Liverpool or other such "British English" accents.

"I thought of a way to pay me back for my obligatory attendance to your... _company event_."

"Nothing over ₤200..."

"No, I looked it up. Children under 16 are free. I've wanted to go to the National Gallery for quite some time now. They've got, at the moment, an excellent collection of Renoir and I want to see it before they trade any of the good ones out. Their Degas and Manet collections aren't so wonderful, but I do believe they have one of 'The Waterlilies' to speak of Monet..."

"Listen to her. She's a Spiegel, isn't she? Or a Clemenceau at the very least. Nearly as pretentious as you and me, and at the tender age of thirteen at that..."

"Fourteen and a half. And I am _not_ pretentious," she paused and smiled, "I never said I liked abstract, did I?"

"In my opinion," I stated with the greatest nonchalance I could attain (for I am actually quite passionate on the subject), "a more fitting adjective to describe abstract art, if one even dare call it art, is 'abominable.'"

"'Atrocious' works, too," spoke Zarathustra.

"I'll add 'abhorrent' and 'appalling' to the alliteral mix," the girl said, disinterestedly turning the sparsely-numbered pages of _Vanity Fair_ or _Vogue_.

"Julia, get your elbows off the table, it's not ladylike."

She complied and I watched her re-arrange the sparkling silver clip that held aurulent silks away from her white face. She had one delightfully surprising taste held away from her other common teenaged interests- a profound love of impressionist art. Her knowledge wasn't spectacularly broad, but it was impressive and detailed when it came to her selected favorites: Manet, Renoir, Pissarro, Degas, Monet, in that order. I would, in later years, attempt to interest her in the old masters and Dutch and Flemish artists, but they never struck her fancy. (Much to my chagrin, she once referred to Bruegel's _The Fall of Icarus _as "pointless and of little artistic worth." Pretentious hussy.)

"Do you want to use some cologne, Vincent?"

"Oh, no. I already put mine on... about an hour and a half ago."

"I'm ready, now."

"Seeing Miss Valentine today, daddy?"

"Maybe," he said, attempting, somewhat successfully, considering, not to appear unsettled by his daughter's insinuation, "but she usually finds some way not to come to the corporate picnics. I sometimes wonder if she actually is as invaluable as she thinks."

Spike and Julia chatted down the staircase and to the car dully of the imminent coming of this year's semester and of her first year in secondary school. Approaching the car in the garage, Julia rushed forth and seized the handle of the locked passenger side door.

"What country is this," I hissed, "where a woman rides in front of a man?"

"But it's different here than on the continent!"

"What language!"

"Julia, in back," ordered my dear brother. I laughed with delight as she begrudgingly obliged.

The great black monolith rolled smoothly off the concrete and over the old, smoke-grey pavement.

"You know, Jack Kerouac once said," began Julia.

"You let her read Kerouac before Baudelaire?"

"I never really liked the Baudelaire translations..." murmured my _demi-frère_.

"I do believe that the entire first chapter of was one single sentence."

"I can recite the first stanza of _Invitation to a Voyage._"

"No, no: _L'Invitation au Voyage_, my child." I paused, "_ma sœur_."

She snorted in disgust. "You're so frustratingly old-fashioned, old man. And that was _not_ a clever reference."

"Proceed, proceed..."

"Nah... _L'Invitation_ is much too overdone. I'll give you _Le Revenant_."

She cleared her throat, for comedic or dramatic reasons, I assume:

_« Comme les anges à l'oeil fauve,  
Je reviendrai dans ton alcôve  
Et vers toi glisserai sans bruit  
Avec les ombres de la nuit... »_

"...and?"

"You don't expect me to know the whole thing, do you?"

Spike halted at a red light and Julia sprang from her seat, apparently unseatbelted, pointing out the window.

"Oh, can we pick up Françoise? I'll need some mental refuge at your stupid..."

"Who?" I inquired.

"Nevermind. _Elle est la russe_. But she's long gone now. You'll probably have her in class."

A prompt electronic ring and subsequent cellular argument superseded my reply and Spike informed us that we were very, dangerously as I recall he put it, late.


End file.
